The Life of Margaret Laurence

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The Life of Margaret Laurence Page 25

by James King


  While in Toronto, she received two important phone calls. The first was from John Cushman, her agent (he had left Willis Wing to start his own agency and Margaret went with him). Holiday wanted her to write two pieces on Egypt. Lawrence Durrell had been the travel magazine’s first choice, but Margaret was happy to say yes. The next phone call was much more problematic. Alan Maclean informed her that since he and Robin Empson were to marry soon, he had to sell Elm Cottage in order to buy a house in Sussex: “Do you want Elm Cottage, Margaret?” His anxious question flummoxed her: “Of course I do, but I don’t have any money. Could you possibly wait until I get back to England?” He agreed to this, but she had no solution in sight to this new dilemma.

  In her account of her first visit back to Canada since 1962, she omits at least three crucial details. First, her friendship with Nadine Jones came grinding to a halt. Although Margaret claimed she hated any form of publicity, Nadine found this not to be the case in Vancouver in 1966. That summer, although she had a newborn baby, she invited Margaret to stay with her, but she became offended when her old friend allowed all sorts of journalists to enter the house and “grandstanded” while she had to deal with a baby who was disturbed by the resulting hoopla. Margaret responded uncomprehendingly to Nadine’s complaints. Second, Margaret made a brief stop-over in Neepawa and offended Mildred Musgrove, who had arranged a small gathering in her honour. Margaret told her: “I can’t bear to see any of my mother’s old friends.” Third, she informed a somewhat startled Jack McClelland that she intended to “fuck” her way from coast to coast during this book tour. Of course, he had no idea whether or not she fulfilled this ambition.

  Margaret Laurence. 1966. (illustration credit 13.1)

  Although she was reluctant to discuss it, Margaret had a moment of heart-breaking intensity when, on a “crazy” impulse, she visited the cemetery in Neepawa that autumn, “and looked at my family’s stone—my father and my mother being skeletons somewhere there, quite meaninglessly, for if they exist at all (and they do—all the ancestors do) it is not in crumbling calcium bone but in my head.” The memory of lives stolen from her had vividly coloured her writing career and created a deep longing for ancestors to whom she could belong.

  Another stop-over was in New York City, which included a weekend stay at Alfred Knopf’s estate at Purchase on Long Island. During that visit, Alfred, who was a camera enthusiast, took some portrait photos of Margaret. Here is the professional woman of letters at the age of forty. She looks a bit severe in her business suit, but the deep sadness of much of Margaret’s life is captured in the rendition of her eyes, eyes that look as if they have beheld many sorrows. A family snapshot from the same time shows her in a more relaxed mood, her lovely features shown to advantage.

  Margaret Laurence in garden at Penn. c. 1966. (illustration credit 13.2)

  Upon arrival back in England, she received another important phone call from her agent. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward—in the manner of dei ex machina—wanted to buy an option on the film rights to A Jest of God. “Woodward’s agent had seen the review of the novel in Life and had thought it might be something Woodward would like to do. So there I was. I suddenly had enough money to make a down payment and get a mortgage on Elm Cottage.” (The purchase price was £8,000. Margaret made a down payment of £3,000 and took a mortgage for the remainder. The sum paid by Newman was $30,000.)

  Two months later she was in Egypt. Her fourth trip of 1966 would bring her, she was afraid, to a nervous collapse, but she felt she had no choice but to accept the offer from Holiday. However, she could not bear to be parted from the children yet again, so she took them along on a month-long holiday and research trip (mid-December to mid-January). She thought of getting in touch with the Egyptian ambassador but decided against this because Jamal was “undoubtedly a pal” of his, and her request for information might look “unethical” and lead her back to the “old lion,” whose den she no longer wanted to enter.

  Always an unsteady traveller, she made arrangements with the Egyptian press attaché regarding her proposed voyage through the Suez Canal (the focus of one her essays) and asked if her “little ones” would be allowed on such a trip. Nonchalantly he replied, “Oh, I don’t see why not, unless there might be some difficulty getting them up the rope ladder.” It was Margaret who was terrified: “ROPE LADDER … ye gods! … I can see it all now … very small item in the Guardian—‘Canadian woman writer falls to death from rope ladder on oil tanker …’ etc.” Despite moments of comic and genuine terror, 1966 was an annus mirabilis for Margaret, a time in which she came into her own as a writer and as an independent woman.

  14

  THE MULTIPLICITY

  OF EVERYTHING

  (1967–1968)

  AS HER BELATED New Year letter to Jack McClelland makes clear, Margaret had a wonderful trip to Egypt, but it was the “little ones” (now fourteen and eleven) who, had, not unexpectedly, been the really intrepid travellers:

  We only got home from Egypt a few days ago. The whole trip went splendidly, and was one of the most terrific experiences of my life. My kids also enjoyed it thoroughly, and I was very glad I’d taken them along, as they were really good companions. We spent a few days in Cairo, then down to Luxor, where we spent 10 days looking at Karnak Temple, Luxor Temple, the temples and tombs of the pharaohs and queens and nobles (with tomb paintings that look as though they’d been done yesterday instead of 3 thousand years ago). Then took a Nile steamer to Aswan—a 2 day trip, and the most relaxing time I’ve spent in years, and at Aswan saw the High Dam, which is fabulous. Then back to Cairo and over to Ismailia, on the Suez Canal, where we boarded a British tanker and travelled on the canal to Port Said. That was the only really ghastly experience of the trip—disembarking with the pilot at Port Said harbour—the tanker was zooming along, and the small pilot launch had to come alongside, and we had to totter down a very narrow gangway and leap aboard the launch—I was absolutely terrified, but we all made it, thank God, with no casualties other than my shattered nerves. My kids said, “Don’t be ridiculous—there was no danger at all.” It must be lovely to be courageous. Spent a week in Port Said, then back to Cairo, where we dutifully crawled through the claustrophobic tunnels in the Great Pyramid in order to say we’d done it (I can’t think of any other reason why anyone would want to go through that kind of ordeal).

  Dutifully, Margaret wrote her two pieces for Holiday (“Good Morning to the Grandson of Ramesses the Second” and “Captain Pilot Shawkat and Kipling’s Ghost”), but the intervention of the Seven Days’ War later that year meant that Egypt was no longer a tourist attraction and thus no longer a suitable destination for the readers of Holiday, which never published these essays. She did receive payment in full, however, and was in the bathtub one evening, “more or less whistling a merry tune and thinking how well things were going, when Jocelyn came pounding up the stairs and knocked on the bathroom door. ‘Mum! Egypt and Israel are at war.’ The moment of truth is sometimes humiliating. My first thought was not for the young Israelis and the young Egyptians set to killing one another. My first thought was, ‘Thank God I got paid.’ ”

  That January, she was elated when the money for the film option arrived and the purchase of Elm Cottage could go ahead. Margaret and Jack celebrated by spending two weeks in southern Spain. This trip helped to change the circumstances of their tumultuous see-sawing marriage, as did Jack’s new job. After completing his master’s degree at Southampton, Jack landed a post as irrigation consultant for the Ministry of Overseas Development. He would be based in Surrey but would travel several months at a time to the various places where projects were being set up. He had even taken a flat in Surbiton, Surrey.

  Unfortunately, Jack’s new job was not as well-paying as his others. He had to cut down the allowance he paid for the children. According to Margaret, the new sum would be suitable if she lived in a coldwater flat in Camden Town. “I wouldn’t have minded (I don’t mind) but what rather bugged me was th
e fact that he believes quite honestly that I have no financial worries at all,” she told Adele. Injury was added to insult when Jack assured her: “You can’t be worried by money—look at the way you live—big house in the country.”

  Shortly after she arrived back in England, she was involved in another short-lived affair, the details of which she confided to Adele:

  The man with whom I had a brief but very nice encounter—whom I think I mentioned to you—turned out to be, as I really had known he would, very anxious about upsetting his established way of life. He is a hell of a nice man, but he is old enough and wise enough to know that few of us can have our cake and eat it too. He’d love to pursue some kind of relationship (horrible word … contemporary cliché) with me, if only it didn’t mean difficult arrangements re: his wife. Is he wrong? Of course not. I can understand perfectly well how he feels. For one thing, like me, he is too old and too damn tired to risk everything he’s spent many years in trying to maintain. So what in fact happens is that he phones me and makes an arrangement to meet me in London, and several days before the time he comes down with “flu. Of course. What else? I did see him, not so long ago, and I wanted to say, “Look, it’s okay, I know you find it too upsetting, so let’s be thankful for what we’ve had and not press our luck too far, and goodbye and God Bless You …” etc.

  In the midst of these somewhat rueful reflections, Jamal called. “Why didn’t you phone me when you got back from Egypt?” Truthfully, she replied that she did not relish the rigamarole of trying to reach him through secretaries. As she talked to him, she realized once again what an amazingly kind person he was. He was also very amusing. Margaret, who could not help laughing at his high spirits, asked how he was. “I’ve been working like a nigger,” he replied. Then, “he at least had the grace to cough awkwardly! He’s a marvellous man, if you like unscrupulous men—he’d stab his own grandmother if it forwarded his career.”

  Four days after writing to Adele, she had reached a resolution—sort of: “Jack and I have decided to get together again, as we have both learned a lot in these 5 years and can now accept one another better as we are.” To the same correspondent—Gordon Elliott—she added two weeks later: Jack “comes here most weekends, and we get on very well indeed. Strange, really. I think we’ve both changed a lot.” They may have changed, but they were nevertheless wary of each other. During Jack’s visits, the Laurences tried to resume their married lives, but then the barriers between them would reassert themselves. She wanted the solidity of a real relationship with a man—rather than the fleeting pleasures of brief encounters—but she did not really wish to commit herself to her marriage in any realistic way that would involve the daily burdens of domestic life.

  Jack had been at one time more supportive of her work than anyone; he had tried to accommodate his wife’s powerful talent. But he was a man of his age, one who was not ashamed of demanding that his wife’s life be centred on his. For Jack, this was the only type of marriage that was acceptable. He hoped Margaret would come round to his way of thinking, and she toyed with this notion because she did love him. But theirs had become a long-distance relationship, one that worked on its own idiosyncratic terms as long as they were not together for too long. The simple truth was that they were deeply fond of each other but now had vastly different notions of what they wanted in life.

  In December 1966, Al Purdy—who had missed meeting Margaret when she had been in Canada that autumn—wrote to tell her he “was just another admirer, and you have those ad nauseam I suppose. Went so far as to buy your books tho, and that’s going pretty far for me.” That declaration led to one by Margaret: “Owing to one of those ironies of life, you were the person I most wanted to meet when I was in Canada this summer and the only person in the whole country (almost) whom I didn’t meet.” Quickly, the Laurence-Purdy friendship flourished in letters.

  These are exchanges between professional writers whose lives were consumed with the glories and travails of subduing words onto paper. That February, Margaret, who knew that no amount of effort would turn her into a Northrop Frye, was struggling with the book that became Long Drums and Cannons while, at the same time, trying to envision her future as a creative writer. It is a measure of her trust in Purdy that she could summarize her various dilemmas to him on February 19:

  Al Purdy. (illustration credit 14.1)

  I’m still attempting to finish a book about contemporary Nigerian prose (novels and plays), and why I ever wrote it I can’t think, as I am certainly not a literary critic, and the North-American scientific-academic school of literary criticism scares the hell out of me (they are all so bright, one feels gloomily). Anyway, I want to get this out of the way, because I got hooked on the whole subject sufficiently to make it impossible to proceed until this particular thing is done. The only thing I really care about is to try to write about three more novels, and writing a novel is what I am supposed to be doing at the moment, with the Canada Council’s financial help, and I am not doing it. I worry greatly over what they will think if (God forbid) they discover this unfortunate fact. Will I be cut off with a shilling, etc? If the novel is really there, it will be written; if it isn’t, it won’t—it is as simple as that. But it isn’t always possible to do things to schedule. It would be great not to have to worry about money.

  Previously, Jack Laurence, Adele Wiseman, Jane Rule, Alan Maclean and Jack McClelland had been the only persons to whom she would confide details about her writing life.

  In Al Purdy, she discovered a person to add to a small list of confidantes. Why him? She had been struck by these lines from The Cariboo Horses: “surrounded by nothing / but beautiful trees / & I hate beautiful trees” (1965) in which Purdy had, by implication, praised the turbulent, wind-swept, often unpicturesque Canadian landscape. She also liked the direct virility of the speaking voice in his verse. Margaret, who could be rivalrous with other writers of prose, did not feel she was in competition with Purdy.

  Although eight years older than she, this large, sprawling man shared similar experiences with her of the Depression, the scarring left in the wake of World War II, and small Scots-Irish Canadian towns. Unlike Margaret, he had not attended university, came from Eastern Ontario and had tried his hand at a number of jobs, including cab driver and factory worker. In her first letter to Purdy, she told him that she loved Elm Cottage because “it staggers along somehow, with damp walls and other blemishes but it has elegance and warmth … I find it reassuring.” From the outset, Margaret and Al found something “reassuring” in each other, perhaps in the fact that from the outside they seemed such ordinary people but within were consumed with similar overpowering obsessions with the life of writing.

  That spring, she could not get on with the writing of her new novel. “In the end,” she told Adele, “the only real joy [in writing] is in the doing of it, and that is the state one longs to have happen again. Writing has always seemed very much like making love, to me.” Margaret used a similar metaphor when describing her dissatisfaction with the short stories and travel pieces she had recently completed: “I suppose I feel I haven’t done anything because none of those things really matter to me, not the way a novel does. It’s like having a few casual affairs.” That May, she asked Jack McClelland to light one or two (mental) candles for her: “It makes me laugh bitterly when I think that years ago I believed that one’s second novel would be easier, and then that one’s third would be easier, and so on. But no. They get more difficult all the time. This one is going to take longer than the last, I fear. The main thing, however, as I keep telling myself, is not to make a major production of it, mentally. It’s only another novel, not the second coming of Christ.” Nevertheless, she was so “tense that my guts,” she wryly observed, “could be used for violin strings.”

  Two months earlier, in March, Margaret was delighted to learn she had won the Governor General’s Award for fiction for A Jest of God. Although astounded, stunned and grateful for the “dough,” a lot of her ner
vous energy in the following two months was drained away by planning the trip to Ottawa. She worked on her next novel but was reasonably content to write the book in her head. She did manage to finish Long Drums and Cannons before leaving for Canada on May 26, but she experienced the “psycho-somatic business” (acute anxiety, nausea, swollen glands, sore throat, fever) that accompanied the completion of every book. “It never fails,” she lamented to Adele.

  During her one-week stay in Canada to receive the Governor General’s Award, she visited with Adele in Montreal and then went on to Ottawa before catching her return flight back to London in Montreal. This compressed stay was much more enjoyable than her two-and-a-half-month stay the year before. The reason was simple: no pressure. She and Adele visited Expo several times and, when in the evening Margaret’s anxieties got the better of her, Adele reassured her: “The book is starting. Relax.”

  Margaret and Adele continued to take great comfort from each other in their personal and literary lives. In some ways, short, stocky and bubbly Adele was a “Jewish mother” to Margaret, always willing to bestow the unconditional love, support and encouragement Margaret needed in her sometimes topsy-turvy life. Before her marriage to Dmitry Stone in 1966, Adele’s life—although she used Winnipeg as her home base—had been even more peripatetic than Margaret’s: London in 1950–1, Rome 1951–2, New York, 1957–60, Montreal, 1964–66. Although she had mounds of energy and considerable talent as a writer, she never approached Margaret in either accomplishment or output. Bothered though she was by the lack of recognition accorded her, she never begrudged Margaret her success. In fact, she was very proud of Margaret the person and the creator.

 

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